Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės vaizdai XVIII amžiuje

Abstract

This article analyses how the British author William Coxe represented the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark (first edition 1784, London). The traveling conditions in the southeast areas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were described mainly negatively. The author repeatedly mentioned narrow and neglected roads and bridges. Most of the visited inns, postal stations, and various other accommodations were characterized very unfavorably as dirty places without minimally acceptable facilities. The landscape of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was portrayed as forested, interspersed with fields as well as small towns and villages. Most of the cities visited looked neglected and disorderly. The socioeconomic system of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, based on manorialism and a feudal economy, seemed to Coxe to be regressive. He highlighted the difficult conditions of serfdom in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which for a long time nurtured a servile type of human being (peasant) who had no sense of responsibility. The noblemen (aristocrats), their lifestyle, behavior, and political activity were depicted basically favorably. The Jewish community of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its activity in trade and services, was portrayed quite positively. Coxe, like many other Western European authors who wrote about the the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, considered the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to be a province of Poland. The content of Coxe’s book did not give rise to the formation of any qualitatively new stereotypes about the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This treatise mostly complemented and reinforced the stereotypes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (as a poorly developed, economically and culturally backward land, etc.) that already existed in Western European consciousness.